World’s leading conservation experts, along with voices from the worlds of finance and industry, discuss whether working in tandem with nature is the soundest investment that business can make.

Capitalists don’t care about the environment. Industry, agriculture and commerce have long exploited nature’s resources. The pursuit of profit pays scant regard to the underlying cost of using up the planet’s capital.

That’s the familiar story that we hear about capitalists. But a growing number of voices are claiming that big business and nature in fact make perfect partners.

Harnessing the processes of nature, they argue, is simply good business sense. Forests, for example, perform carbon capture worth £2.3 trillion a year. Nature not only does this for free, it executes it with greater efficiency than any supply-chain manager could dream of. A Texan chemical plant, for instance, recently discovered that it could keep its ground ozone levels down by planting a forest nearby, for the same cost as erecting a new smokestack scrubber which would have done the same job.

This is simply one example of how business can thrive through collaboration with nature. But the question is, can such solutions be developed on a mass scale? Or is this vision of business and nature working hand in hand across the globe just a case of wishful green thinking?

Come and hear the experts on 9th February, and make up your own mind.

Speakers

Tony Juniper

Sustainability adviser and former executive director of Friends of the Earth. He is the author of What Has Nature Ever Done For Us? and co-author with HRH Prince of Wales of Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World.

Nick Dearden

Director of the World Development Movement, which campaigns in the UK on global justice issues. He is strongly opposed to any moves to put a price on nature. Dearden was formerly the director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign and corporates campaign manager at Amnesty International UK, and is a regular contributor to the Guardian.

Peter Kareiva

Chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, and cofounder of the Natural Capital Project, a pioneering partnership between The Nature Conservancy, Stanford University and WWF to develop credible tools that allow routine consideration of nature’s assets and ecosystem services. He previously worked for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Chair

Matthew Taylor

Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Before joining the RSA in 2006, he was the Chief Adviser on Political Strategy to Tony Blair, and the Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research between 1999 and 2003.

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COMPETITION: Win 1x pair of tickets to attend Money Can Grow on Trees at The Royal Institution of Great Britain on Monday 9 February at 18:30. To enter the competition, send an email to bojana@run-riot.com with the correct answer in the ‘subject’ box. The winner will be randomly selected.

Q: For this event, Intelligence Squared is collaborating with The Nature Conservancy - an environmental organisation best know for which campaign: 

A: 1) Build a Robot 2) House a Penguin 3) Plant a Billion Trees